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The dark brick building on the far right is the Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett & Co. Warehouse Building, later known as the Mandel Building. It was designed by the famous Chicago architecture firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White and built in 1926, hard on the north bank of the Chicago River. Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett was a wholesale hardware concern. In 1946 the building was sold to the Mandel Brothers Department Store. I remember it as the "temporary" home of the main branch of the Chicago Public Library from 1975 through the late 1980s, while the present Harold Washington Library was being debated, planned, and finally built. It was torn down in 1989, two years before the new library building was finished. For many years the Mandel Building was quite prominent in the Chicago cityscape, because it could be seen easily from North Michigan Avenue, where there was a largely empty space directly across from the Wrigley Building.

If that is in fact the Inbound Freight House, then it seems to me that those trucks should be loading, not unloading, since that facility would have handled arriving shipments, not departing. But, given the absence of any visible human activity; not a single truck tractor anywhere; the decrepit condition of the trailers and their ownership by a single carrier (Dixon)... I'm wondering if even as early as 1943 the volume of LCL freight moving by rail had dropped off to the point that the ICRR had consolidated its Inbound and Outbound LCL operations into one facility, and leased out the excess warehouse space to the Dixon truck line, and that most if not all of those ancient trailers were semi-retired to stationary service.

Answering my own question, it's the Music Corporation of America Building. At first I could not locate a picture. After deducing the location to be 430 North Michigan Avenue I ran across a description of it at Emporis.com -- "one of the narrowest skyscrapers in the country with a depth of only 25 feet from Michigan Avenue to its backside. The art deco design gave strong vertical emphasis to the center of the Michigan Avenue facade with continuous limestone piers rising to 3 projecting fins in front of a set-back upper floor."

It was replaced in 1963 by the Realtor Building. Later I found a picture of it in John W. Stamper's book "North Michigan Avenue."

If anyone is curious as to why I wanted to know this it is because I construct models of scenes from railroads of the past. My particular interest is the Illinois Central. I am identifying the buildings in Jack Delano's photographs and incorporating them into a model of the Chicago, Grant Park and the Streeterville buildings I can identify from the photos.

I'd be interested to know what kind of "journalist" thinks color film didn't exist in the 1940s. Hope you're not a photographer - you'd need to quit and go back to school. (This is, by the way, one of our most frequent uninformed comments.) - Dave

This section of (once) empty land is owned by IL Central RR. At the beginning of the skyscraper boom, the land became extremely valuable. The RR held on to the land ownership but sold the rights above the land (air rights) to developers that would later build the now familiar skyline. The skycrapers now in this area are privately owned, but the land on which they sit is still owned by the RR.

You've got the location down. That's because the Illinois Center used to be the terminus of the Illinois Central. For years, it was a big empty lot (and it is still only now being developed) and it was referred to as the "Illinois Central Air Rights".

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.